Student-centred classes: it’s not just pair work!

What do teachers mean by student-centred classes? It seems some only see it as increasing pair work and reducing whole class teaching. The teacher should be a facilitator setting up tasks and watching, rather than doing explicit teaching. That at least was an impression I had from one teacher at a recent training, but it also comes from CELTA trainers urging to keep teacher talking time (TTT) to a minimum and others who frown on direct explicit teaching. However, I think this is a rather reductive way of thinking about learner-centred classrooms and hides important principles of student-centredness, that can quite legitimately involve whole-class work ‘led’ by a teacher.

Key elements to be student-centred

To be fair, pinning down what ‘student-centred’ means is not easy and the uncertainty is not unique to ELT – as you can see in this review about university contexts. Here is another guide with slightly different emphasis. Or you can try Wikipedia as a summary which is a good as any. It seems to me that there are four main overlapping elements in these descriptions:

• starting from or connecting to (individual) students’ interests and existing knowledge and skills
• providing some choice or agency in what students learn and how success will be assessed
• seeing other learners and self-discovery as effective sources of knowledge and learning (not just the teacher)
• active participation in the learning (e.g. learning by doing/co-construction of meaning) rather than listening ‘passively’ to ‘dictated’ information from the teacher

Non-student-centred pair work

Of course, pair and group work fit strongly with these ideas and they may be student-centred, but it ain’t necessarily so. For example, at low levels we might give students different photos as prompts to ask what is/ are [person] doing? which students reply to by saying what they see. How far could we say that this is a student-centred activity based on these four elements? Maybe there is something there, but it doesn’t seem much different to a teacher conducted drill or a student completing a written grammar exercise.

Dialogue-building: learner-centred or not?

We can contrast this with the process of dialogue building that I presented in a training session to a group of ESOL teachers. This is what led to the comment that it seemed ‘teacher-centred’ and the question “aren’t we supposed to be more student-centred – do more pair work?”. You can judge for yourselves. I’ll describe the process and you can consider how it fits with the four aspects of student-centred classes above. It’s something I do mainly with lower-level students, although I might do a truncated version of it as part of feedback to a speaking task or a language exercise in a book.

Dialogue building process

1 The first stage of the dialogue build is that you present the first line of a dialogue. It’s usually a question (What are you doing after the class? / Do you like …X?) but it could be a statement (I’m not going to be in class next week/Oh no. I don’t believe it!). The teacher can provide or elicit the meaning through mime, photo or explanation, but I usually do it with a translation.

2 You drill this first line with the whole class and then individuals.

3 As individuals repeat the first line, you model different typical responses to this first line .

4 You turn the exchange round and say the first line to individual students for them to respond.

5 Students can use one of the response you modelled or offer their own using the language they have or their L1.

6 You help them say what they want by giving (or asking a student to give) a translation/reformulation. The individual and sometimes the whole class will repeat the new language.

7 You get different students to say the first line to another student across the class and the other student respond (with you helping if necessary)

8 Students then do the exchange in closed pairs as a mingle or with an immediate partner or in small groups. You listen.

7 You elicit the first line from students and write it on the board. You elicit various responses and/or write some examples you heard with some gaps for students to fill in as a class

8 You select one response and elicit various possible third lines.

9 You or the students select one response which sets off the next round at stage 2 and repeat what follows, sometimes adding a stage where students practise the whole dialogue.

The process is controlled by students’ abilities

The process is iterative and can involve almost any number of these two-part exchanges within one dialogue – although the reality is that students current level of knowledge and how much new language they can take on will limit how far we go. Cleary, the teacher has a very central role as a mediator in this process, but to my mind it still fits well with a student-centred class.

Teacher-mediated but student-centred

Firstly, in planning the dialogue to build the teacher is taking account of students needs and interests because they are choosing a real communicative goal rather than presenting a grammar rule to learn. The choice of dialogue may have also come from what we know about students or what has previously come up in class.

Secondly it fits with students interests and give them some choice, by giving students space to give their own responses, not just the teacher’s model.

Thirdly we can see the performative pair work within the whole (T-S and S-S) shows that content and learning can come from the other students not just the teacher.  WE can also reinforce this through the feedback to the closed pair work.

Fourthly, we are involving students in the active learning and they are doing the dialogue. A certain amount is repetition and drilling, but they are also co-constructing the dialogue and also offering idea for the gapped feedback sentences, perhaps offering rules or reasons if encouraged to do so.

In fact, we could do the process without the closed pair work altogether or replace it with students individually writing example exchanges and it would still fit with the fundamental principles of student-centred teaching.

I like pair work, but it’s not always what’s best for students

This is not to say that there aren’t more student-centred classrooms where students work more independently and the teacher takes more of a back seat.  These lessons might be more motivating, they might be more effective as some argue, but I think we also need to be clear that this is not always the case. In some circumstances, pair work might even slow down learning.

At the lowest levels, teachers’ expectations about pair work (sometimes driven by inspectors’ expectations) can lead to a reduction in the repetition of language. Yet beginner learners need this repetition and recall to get their tongues round the new sounds as well as remember it. In order to support the independent activity, teachers may give students more text so they are effectively reading aloud rather than recalling language. Alternatively, as in the “What’s X doing?” example above, we end up doing things which are so controlled, they don’t live up to student-centredness either.

Colours: what is a student-centred way to teach them?

For example, I observed a lesson once where students did an exercise matched colours to the word in English. Students then practised by saying which of these colours were in different pictures. They then each drew their country’s flags, which the other students then identified and named the colours. This just doesn’t seem to match the criteria of a student-centred class to me.

If I was going to teach colours, I’d rather ask questions to students in the whole class. Thing like, what colours do you like (to wear)? Or what colour is you flat / house / home? Do you have a car? What colour Is it? I’d support students with pictures, translation, writing on the board etc. Having done this whole class, I’d probably then do pair work where students discuss the same questions in closed pairs. You can hear an example of this teacher fronted, student-centred approach in this YouTube video.

Another context for whole-class learner centredness

We might also think of the situation of MFL teachers, like a friend of mine who teaches Spanish in UK secondary schools related to me. In large mixed ability classes of teenagers, teachers might need to restrict pair work because of behaviour management. There are also political pressures within UK education where teacher observations and assessment value explicit teaching and setting out what students will learn from the start. But equally that doesn’t necessarily mean returning to lectures and passive listening. It seems to me the dialogue build and the ‘questions about colours’ above both meet criteria of student-centred classes. However, they are also quite explicit in their teaching and retaining a certain amount of control over the class.

Yes, pair work and tasks are great. I use them all the time, but we need to have a nuanced view. We shouldn’t let the ideal be the enemy of the good.

Why not do our course on teaching low levels which (among other things) looks more at dialogue building and integrating it into your lessons.